Forgotten Landmines: 7 New Poetry Collections to Read This August

“You see, one can live without having survived,” writes Carolyn Forché. That sounds grim, and indeed it is, but it also points to one of the qualities that makes contemporary poetry so remarkable: an inexhaustible resolve to see what is

Related

Other articles with overlapping topics.

L

Literary Hub

Awake Awake

All is recollection save for the slender membrane of now. Every present thought, every present feeling, collides with a league of their familial ghosts. And if our lives in this moment seem flimsy, that is because they are. We dwell

Lit Hub Excerpts·Aug 5, 2026

L

Literary Hub

Rumpelstiltskin is My Unlikely Writing Companion

A few years ago, scrolling through social media when I should have been writing, I came across a photo of the Lady Bird edition of Rumpelstiltskin. Struggling to remember the specifics of the story, I googled it. There, in the

Louise Nealon·Aug 5, 2026

The New Yorker

Free quota

An Uncompromising Belgian Novelist’s Afterlife as a BookTok Star

Jacqueline Harpman wrote her best-known works in the nineteen-nineties, but her fiction’s elegiac loneliness seems to anticipate our own solitary, screen-bound era.

Katy Waldman·Aug 3, 2026·10 min read

P

Public Books

“Melodrama with a Modern Sensibility”: A Conversation with Megan Cummins

How do the families and friends of those struggling with addiction perceive that addiction, cope with it, and try (or fail) to love that person anyway? The post “Melodrama with a Modern Sensibility”: A Conversation with Megan Cummins appeared first on Public Books.

Megan Cummins·Aug 4, 2026

P

Public Books

B-Sides: “Somebody Is Walking on Your Grave: My Cemetery Journeys” by Mariana Enriquez

“I spent my adolescence in Buenos Aires and made my own fumbling pilgrimages to that city’s cemeteries.” The post B-Sides: “Somebody Is Walking on Your Grave: My Cemetery Journeys” by Mariana Enriquez appeared first on Public Books.

Imani Radney·Aug 3, 2026

The Dial

Seven Literary Sins — The Dial

Bad habits and secret pleasures.

13 min read